A Pilgrim’s Digression

Every year, the Government agency for which I work has a used book sale to support its employee Professional Association. I always make a point of stopping in. My fellow employees are a remarkably well-educated group of people, and there are always some unusual finds to be had.

For less than five dollars, I bought a copy of the Viking Portable Cervantes, Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot, a Majorcan edition of George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca (translated by no less than the poet Robert Graves, of all people), and a book of former Poet Laureate Bill Collins’ poems, Nine Horses.

Some other books I picked up and then put down were: a Penguin edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls, an Oxford Shakespeare, a Modern Library edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—all books which I already own.

In particular, as I considered buying Dead Souls, I found myself remembering how I enjoyed reading that book. I read it only a year or two ago. Yet as I thought about it, I suddenly realized that as amusing as I had found it, I could not remember the slightest detail about it.

I could not remember the main character’s name, or any characters’ name. I could not recall to mind a single plot point, save for something vague about a hat box that the main character always carried about with him. Or was it a cigar box.

Then I began considering the other books in my hands, particularly the Joyce novel. Once, I would have said I knew A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as any book. I can still recall to mind the opening: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a nicens little boy named baby Tucoo…”

Yet beyond that, and beyond the main character’s memorable name, Stephen Dedalus, what do I really remember? Nothing, save for one quote: “History, Stephen said, is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

So much for the intellectual rewards of a good education in the Humanities.

Sometime in our early twenties, I believe our brain reaches a peak amount of information which it can contain. Thereafter adulthood becomes a gradual process of forgetting all that we have learned and quietly reverting to a self-satisfied, child-like state of dependence on a few pillars of so-called truth. Over the years, knowledge and memories drain from our porous skulls like water through a sieve.

How else to explain the vast waste of my dessicated and dying brain?

Ironically, we say that as people grow older, they grow wiser when in fact they may just be growing blindly accustomed to their own slow brain death. A person “settles down” and gets married, begets children or births children, gets a “real job” with a retirement fund, vacations in ordinary places such as the beach or at an aptly named “amusement” park, or they travel to Europe for a week every few years and return thinking themselves much richer now because they have stood atop the Eiffel Tower with all the other tourists; they vote in elections, bury loved ones with quiet pain but no tears, send the children out into the world to settle down as well, gradually resign themselves to lonely old age while their children are away settling; then they die suddenly while doing dishes or walking the dog; or else they die not so suddenly after an illness and everyone says “well, they’re better off.”

…and we say this person has “matured.” Maturation seems but another word for death.

On the other hand, at least it is correct to say that such a person has indeed “settled.”

My brain feels like the sludge left over from a flood, much of the time. I rake through the muck with my fingers, trying to salvage some bauble I can clean off and keep. Maybe I can even present it to someone else. But it is hard work, and I am not half so brilliant as I think I am. Not even a quarter. I’m just really good at faking it.

I read, and read, and read, and forget, and forget, and forget. It’s like I can’t fill my brain with a new book unless I toss out another. And where do all the forgotten books I’ve read disappear to? And what good did it do me to read them, if I can’t remember them any longer?

On the train today, I began reading a novel by a favorite author of mine, W. Somerset Maugham. I’ve read three other books by Maugham, Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge, and The Moon and Six-Pence, all three of which I’ve mostly forgotten. Maugham was a nineteenth century author with the misfortune to live well into the twentieth century. Maugham and Churchill were exact contemporaries and good friends, dying the same year.

Thus Maugham fits securely into neither of the centuries in which he lived. The twentieth century pretty much disregarded him, and I would say the twenty-first century will probably do much the same. It is regrettable, to say the least.

Cakes and Ale is a novel about a writer who is commissioned to write an official, thus expurgated, biography of a literary lion with a shady past. With his usual impeccably high style, in the preface Maugham writes that “Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances it will be disregarded…”

How much more heart-rending that even books recognized as great are just as easily forgotten. Forgotten not in the sense of never having been discovered in the first place, but forgotten in the way that we read a newspaper item in the morning and have completely forgotten it by mid-day.

I look back upon my past, and I see that I have been like a blind but very hungry caterpillar crunching my way through pages and shitting them out again without any real digestion taking place.

In the end, however, maybe that is all there is: appetite. We read to amuse ourselves; and if we learn nothing from our reading then how different are we from the masses of people who amuse themselves in other ways? Yet we readers think ourselves so much wiser.

I think of all the used book sales I’ve been to in my life; I think of the used book stores I’ve discovered and then frequented; I think of the hundreds of books I’ve purchased and read, and I wonder what has been the end result of all this painstaking acquisition and gluttony.

Just this past weekend, I finished unpacking and shelving probably twenty boxes of books, and there are perhaps another ten or fifteen in storage. All of them are beloved—I can never part with a book, unless I somehow have acquired two copies of the same one. Most of these books I’ve read at least once, and many of them I’ve read twice or more. Some of these books are so special, that I forever associate them with the time and place in which I read them: David Copperfield and The Lord of the Rings I read on one of my fishing trips to Canada, for example.

Yet no matter how important to me, most of these books are forgotten, too.

These books stand as markers along my life’s way, fading signposts against a darkening mental landscape of forgetfulness.